There are many complexities to the financial services business. At any given time large amounts of sales transaction data must be organized and processed. Such data may relate to many types of sales transactions and much of it is necessary to keep the business running smoothly. Some of the more significant classifications of sales transaction data stem from the fact that in the financial services business there are multiple distribution channels each with multiple distributors and many different incentive plans for employees. In most instances, these incentive plans are constantly modified and changed. This is particularly true in the financial services sector where distributors and sales representatives may require certain licenses and appointments in order to legally sell certain financial instruments. The status of the license or appointment data changes continuously and must therefore be updated on a regular basis. Furthermore, the volume of sales transactions is large, and for each transaction a number of tests must carried out to validate the sales agents' credentials and compute the compensation amounts associated with the sales transactions.
Updating such a large amount of records is a cumbersome process that can require significant system resources. Thus, systems must be configured to efficiently validate sales transactions in view of the licenses and/or appointments necessary to legally complete the transaction. Existing systems do not currently have a mechanism for processing such data in a way that minimizes the time required to process license and appointment data and validate a sales agent's credentials before distributing compensation to the sales agent for the transaction. Therefore there is a need for an improved mechanism for processing sales transaction data.
An embodiment of the invention comprises a method and apparatus for performing collective validation of credential information. The invention has applicability in industries that require sales agents or those related to the distribution of a certain product to be credentialed (e.g., licensed and/or appointed) when selling certain products (e.g., life insurance, etc. . . . ). For example, in order to sell some financial instruments sales representatives must meet state and/or federal licensing requirements. Embodiments of the invention provide a way to ensure that sales representatives operate within any regulatory constraints put in place by government or any other organization. Companies may, for instance, utilize embodiments of the invention to ensure that sales representatives operate within a set of defined constraints.
One aspect of the invention provides a method for validating sales agents' credentials while processing the sales transaction data to determine commission amounts. The system is configured to perform such transaction processing in an efficient manner that minimizes the amount of computational resources required to determine whether a sales agent has valid credential at the time of a particular sale and is therefore entitled to compensation (e.g., a commission) for the sale. The system may process one or more transactions at a time and may perform transaction processing collectively if such processing is desirable.
In an embodiment of the invention, the compensation engine or some other software component determines the grouping of input such that validation can be performed collectively (e.g., in batch). For instance, the compensation engine may perform an initialization process where it obtains credential information that relates to the sales agents and assembles the credential information into a denormalized table. The system may obtain credential information (e.g., licensing and/or appointment data) from several tables of a database and put the credential information into a single denormalized table. The system may also load rule information that can be utilized to process the credential information. This rule information may be provided to the system in any structured form (e.g., text, XML, etc. . . . ) and the rule data may comprise a set of tests for determining if a particular transaction was valid. In one embodiment of the invention, the system instantiates an instance of an object oriented class referred to as the RuleSet class. The RuleSet class and a set of associated object reachable from that class (e.g., preconditions, test, etc. . . . ) provide the functionality referred to as the rule engine. Thus, the rule engine may comprise a collection of objects working together. However, the invention also contemplates other software or hardware mechanisms configured to provide rule engine functionality. The objected oriented examples provided herein are for illustrative purposes and the reader should note that other non-objected oriented programs may be configured to provide the functionality described herein.
Once the rule information is loaded, an embodiment of the invention utilizes the rule information to determine if the distributor (e.g., sales agent) specified in the transaction was properly credited. Thus, the system obtains a set of transactions (e.g., a batch) associated with one or more sales agents and utilizes the transaction data to determine if a commission amount associated with each transaction may be credited to one or more of the sales agent's accounts. Compensation is distributed when the constraints placed on the sales transaction are satisfied. For example, a sales representative that made a sale under an invalid credential (e.g., a license or appointment) will not be compensated for the sales. Thus, part of the compensation process involves determining the validity of the sales agent's credentials (e.g., license and/or appointment data).
In one embodiment of the invention, the process associated with determining whether the credential data is valid involves converting each transaction to input usable by the rule engine. A collective set of rule engine input may then be provided to the system to perform validation. The process of determining whether the transaction input is valid may involve determining the set of rules that apply to the input by filtering the rules using a set of preconditions. The set of tests may then be partitioned by test type and each test type is associated with the transaction input. Once the association occurs a candidate for each test type is selected and a collective group of the tests of a particular type is formulated. The group of tests is then input to the system for processing. The reader should note, however, that the invention does not require that such test data be input collectively (e.g., in batch). The test data (e.g., tests of a particular type) may also be input individually or in any other categorical methodology that provides the test data to the system. The results can be stored in cache for later use by the system.
For each rule associated with each input, the system determines if the test conditions are met. If the test conditions are met, the transaction data with respect to that test type is considered valid. The system may use the cached results to determine if the test conditions are met. The results indicate which of the transactions are valid and can therefore be utilized to determine which sales agents to compensation for a particular transaction.
In an embodiment of the invention, the functionality is accomplished through the use of a set of software and/or hardware components configured to determine whether a sales transaction should result in a credit to the sales agent associated with the transaction. The system may perform this by utilizing a compensation engine configured to communicate with the rule engine. In one embodiment of the invention, the rule engine comprises a collection of software interrelated components.